This paper proposes a discussion to help understand the fierce efficacy of moral harassment in the workplace. For this, the issue discussed is that of identitary construction, which depends on the acknowledgement directed on doing, since identity is inseparable of the technical gestures conducted by the subject. This is also a gender issue, of belonging to a sex. In work psychodynamics, a special attention is given to the construction of work collectives which weld a team to professional rules. Cooperation needs an adjustment of particular procedures for carrying out a task, but it is also a confrontation of each individual's ethical positions, based on shared trust and, therefore, of possible cooperation. Nevertheless, moral harassment became a real management strategy, based on the radicalization of the new forms of work organization which favor defensive virility, which seem to have deeply transformed the relationships within the work teams and radicalized the defense systems built to resist it.
Workplace psychodynamics; work organization; moral harassment; gender; identitary construction